Case study: Crane TV - cross-platform video magazine

The challenge

Crane.tv report on culture and trends across art, design, fashion, food & travel.
Offering a highly curated mix of the established and emerging,
they lift the curtain on the world's trend setters.

When we first met the Crane team, they were struggling to cope with growing traffic and content.
The management of the website had become too restrictive, relying on a single page template.
The website’s video content could not be accessed on mobile devices,
and the overall user experience was becoming increasingly slow and unresponsive.

Working alongside the design team,
we implemented a new web publishing platform to provide full control over page layouts,
allowing content authors to “drag & drop” elements on to a page.
We then automated the video encoding process to reduce publication time and effort,
added support for mobile and tablet devices,
and redesigned the underlying web architecture to improve performance and provide a faster user experience.

What we made

To support growing traffic and content,
we developed a seamless, cross-platform video experience optimised for tablet and mobile,
with a publishing platform that allows
editorial teams to build highly-curated pages with individual layouts via “drag and drop”

Mixed media page layouts

Combining videos, images, galleries, content, tweets and maps – editors can control the size of each "tile" and create exclusive layouts for every page.

Automated video encoding

Multiple video formats, including 720p HD with the encoding workflow integrated into the CMS for quick and easy publishing.

Smart image cropping

Automatically crops images into the different tile sizes, with smart image cropping based on the image content.

Syndication

Automatically syndicates new content to partner websites – including the Washington Post and the Guardian.